I suppose, looking back, and it is only today that I consider
such things, but the experiences I had at the family farm in Dromara were quite
important for the future King of Ireland and a world leading Master Candle
Maker to learn. I was taught about
farming and about food production. We
shall not mention the other farm outside Glenarm, at Feystown, where the only
thing I learned was that, as a youngster, if you drink enough cider you become
what is known as very drunk and again, despite the fact that I was unconscious
for most of the journey back to Belfast, it was an important lesson but still
remains one of the most uncomfortable memories of my young existence.
Dromara was alcohol free.
I loved the smell of the meal that I would mix to feed the pigs. The sows were lovely but the boar was a brute
of a thing, kept separate from the girls and I remember that it would try to
take the legs off you when you would enter his sty to feed him. Of course, having short trousers and the
loveliest legs in Ireland would present such a delicious culinary sight that
the old boar must have thought he had died and gone to pig heaven.
I too remember the piglets, they were so cute and pink and I especially
remember my uncle siting on a box just inside the barn door. The new piglets were gathered behind, hemmed
in with walls of straw bales. One by one
the piglets were presented to my uncle who gripped each male piglet between his
legs and whipped off the testicles with a single edged razor blade. Something was applied to the wound and the
piglet was returned to a new pen. The
testicles however were thrown to the dogs and I mean that literally. The two dogs loved this time of year.
Cats too were on the farm but this is where you learn that on
a farm everything has to work for its keep and as a young boy you don’t really
think it strange that a litter of new born kittens should be put in an old
potato sack with a couple of house bricks.
Neither do you think it strange that the sack, the bricks and the
kittens were then unceremoniously dumped into the nearby stream. Very strange, but another lesson learned.
Thinking back now, the Dromara farm was quite advanced compared
to other places I had stayed. The
cottage we had near Lurgan didn’t have running water. It did have an outside toilet along with the
obligatory plank, neatly ripped squares of old newspaper on a string and
ginormous spiders so big and fast they would have been more at home wearing a
saddle and a jockey then entered into the Grand National.
The cottage at Lurgan had a large wooden water butt that
collected the rain water from the roof and for breakfast you would collect a
saucepan full to make the tea and a basin full to have a wash. In Dromara there was an outside toilet, which
wasn’t that bad, not many spiders, I would hate to think what happened to the
spiders on the farm but the Dromara farm did have running water. Unfortunately it was running from a pump
across the road so I would be sent out with two buckets and would pump the
water up, fill the buckets and carry them back to the farmhouse. Little did I know it but I would meet a
similar water pump a few years later at Violent Hell.
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